April 23, 2008

Hello friends in this blog i am going to discuss FAT(File Allocation Table) file system the most common term that you heard in computer world.

Begin with the history of FAT file system it is developed in 1967 by Bill Gates and Marc McDonald. At that time this file system is assumed to be the primary file system for the majority of operating systems eg Microsoft Windows(up to ME), OPEN DOS, MS-DOS etc. The most common drawback that is found in FAT file system is that when old files are deleted and new files are written on the disk then after it directory fragments are scattered over the entire disk due to this some more advanced versions of FAT file system are developed like FAT12, FAT 16, FAT32 and exFAT.The integer value that is associated with their name represents the version of the file system that means FAT12 represents 12 bit version and so on. The last one exFAT is the extended version of the 32 bit FAT file system. Now here i am going to discuss only FAT32 because it is the latest version of FAT, this version i s developed due to the volume size limit of the FAT16. In FAT32 the cluster values are held in the 32 bit field in which its 28 bits are used to hold the cluster number. About the future of FAT file system we can only say that it is limited to the volume of 32 GB, due to which users switch over the NTFS(New Technology File System) if they want to partition the drive into smaller volumes.